I'm not sure I agree with you, but I can see where you're coming from.

As for staying in Iraq (even though without the "evidence" of WMDs we would never have gone in in the first place) I'm not sure I agree. Sure, we have some responsibility to clean up the mess we've made, and there is a possibility (not a probability) of total chaos breaking out if we withdraw precipitously. But total chaos could break out anyway, no matter what we do, from some totally unexpected quarter and we would not only get mired in it, we would still have no way to stop it other than killing lots of innocent people along with a few bad guys. And that is exactly what the bad guys want us to do.

Second, it is pretty clear that our only function there now is to provide cheap security so that their terrorists, gangsters and politicians can concentrate on enriching themselves at our expense while we do the dying and the killing. Third, even if we really needed to stay there, it's not too clear we can sustain the present tempo of military ops much longer. We've redlined the war machine for too long and it could sling a rod at any time. And it's pretty clear that the Iraqis only seem to fight well in their homeboy militias. The army and police are a joke, surge or no surge.

But this is all neither here nor there. The point is that we no longer control events there, we are forced to respond to them, and although that might be worth the risk if we had some real specifiable objective in mind, we don't. The best we can come up with is "to keep things from getting worse". Sooner or later, our luck will run out. The purpose of war is to impose a political objective, not only have we lost the capability of doing that, we can't even define a realistic one any more.